With selective memories of Gakona, AK
[Until we lived there, I thought AK stood for Arkansas, but now I know it's the sound you make trying to draw breath at 55 below.]

I recently received an email asking permission to use portions of my book, Too Far North: A Northern Cartoon Odyssey, in an exhibit of Alaskan sequential art (aka cartoons). We had produced it over twenty years ago in the dead of a south central Alaskan winter, with the help of publisher friends. The exhibit (www.cartoonnorth.net) was held this month in a small gallery between College and Ester, Alaska, on "the road" that runs between Fairbanks and Anchorage. In the mid 1980s, this area would have been too small to call "podunk," especially in midwinter when there's not enough unfrozen liquid around to dunk anything, rich or po'. Nevertheless, I couldn't be more honored, even if it were in the New York Museum of Modern Art. (Well, that's probably not true, but I don't have to worry about finding out.)

My wife and I, along with our then five kids, had planned to winter in Alaska to see the Northern Lights, and then return to Northern Virginia after the school year and spring breakup. As the winter progressed, we needed to raise enough funds to stay fed and get home, so we published the book, which was a collection of cartoons I'd done for our friends' bi-weekly Copper River Country Journal. The cartoons were usually executed by lantern light after the kids were asleep, in ball-point pen on copier paper.

My greatest compliment came from a Journal reader in Tok who wrote, "This is real Alaskan humor." So, then, what is real Alaskan humor? Certainly, it runs the same gamut as any other humor genre, too often on the cruder side to meet the preconceptions of tourists, but with the penetration of the wilderness by technology, just about anything can be had or viewed on The Last Frontier. Twenty years ago satellite was sometimes the only way to communicate, with the satellite dishes pointed almost to the horizon, a visual and visceral indication of just how far into northern latitudes we had come.

My cartoons focused on the more quirky aspects of rural Alaskan life as we experienced it. No, I never really saw a house made entirely of duct tape, but I suspect they exist. No, my kids never fought over the Sears catalog as a source of indoor recreation, but they did decorate the cabin with paper snowflakes and listened to the output of our home entertainment center: the two stations we could pick up on our clock radio and the tapes we played on our Fisher-Price cassette recorder.

Unfortunately, like mosquitoes, puns can exist that far north, although swans do not return for the summer in "S"s, but rather in the same "V"s as other migratory waterfowl. Even more unfortunately, unlike mosquitoes, puns do not die off in winter.

Alaskan humor reflects the same vagaries of the human condition found elsewhere, though Alaskans may be reticent to admit it. More than elsewhere, Alaskan humor must also pay homage to the larger population of two-, four-, and six-footed, pawed, clawed, winged or otherwise appendaged denizens of the state, not to mention the finned or flippered river and sea folk. Having a moose in it doesn't make it Alaskan humor, although having a flying saucer cross the galaxy, only to run into a moose on "the road," just might. This also was the only way I could work road kill moose into a humor context, since those encounters were often fatal for both the moose and the occupants of the vehicle. To add insult to injury or death, you or your survivors wouldn't benefit from the windfall of moose meat, as there was a list of indigent families waiting to get a phone call that their moose was available 100 miles away. We had more than our share of close encounters of the moose and caribou kind, and they were only a laughing matter after the fact.

Oh, yeah, the Northern Lights. We did see them, and as they can stay almost motionless for hours and then suddenly start dancing at breathtaking speed, you have to decide in advance just how long you'll stand there watching before your brain freezes and you forget to go back inside. We also saw them from the doorway of our north-facing latrine. The door was no obstacle to viewing as it had blown off in the fall during a week of 100-mph chinook winds. Of course, when using the latrine in the winter, you had to let the seat drop hard first to remove the two inches of hoar frost.

Springtime was another source of humor, when kids would measure the depth of ice-melt puddles by wading into them. The water was always at least a half inch above the tops of their "breakup boots." By that time we were packing to return home. The nights were too light to see the Aurora, but the local fauna springing back to life all around our cabin sounded like a Tarzan movie. On the drive back "outside," after surviving the winter with little more trouble than a broken lifter, we experienced a cracked windshield and a flat tire within two hours on the first major paved road in British Columbia. Good ol' Alaskan, or northern, humor.